335 - Align Your Mind - Britt Frank (rebroadcast)

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0:33Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, episode 357. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, episode 357. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast. Welcome to the You Are Not So Smart Podcast, episode 357.

1:03I wouldn't even listen to a podcast if there wasn't at least one part of you that thought, perhaps I can learn my way out of this, or perhaps there's a nugget of information that will make this make sense. That was the voice of psychologist, therapist, trauma expert, author, speaker, science advocate, and science communicator,

1:47Britt Frank, who you may remember from her first appearance on this show. In that appearance, we discussed her book, The Science of Stuck. And in that episode, we talked all about her therapeutic approach and, as the title suggests, the science behind what gets people stuck and unstuck in life. I highly recommend that episode. It's number 230, and I highly recommend that book, The Science of Stuck.

2:18I received an incredible amount of positive feedback about that episode. It's definitely one of the all-time You Are Not So Smart favorites. And in her second appearance, we discussed the psychological science behind procrastination, what it is, why we do it, and how to navigate around our propensity to procrastinate, which is also one of the most downloaded episodes of the podcast. In this episode, Britt returns to discuss her latest book, which, at the time of this recording,

2:52just became available for purchase. It's called Align Your Mind, and as she puts it, it's a rogue punk down-in-the-dirt exploration workbook, textbook, and guide to something known in therapy circles and in psychology nerddom as parts work.

3:20What is parts work? Well, first of all, that's not its technical name. It's very commonly referred to as parts work, but technically, it's a form of psychotherapy known as internal family systems. And even more technically, this is a systems thinking and systems psychology approach to therapy. Psychologists, client behaviors, problems, solutions, but in a framework developed in the 1980s

3:50and popularized in the 1990s by psychologist Richard C. Schwartz at Purdue University. IFS imagines the mind a lot like the Inside Out animated movies imagine the mind as parts, as characters, with individual specialized functions that interact and, at times, have competing goals. In hardcore psychology, these are considered individual systems, and when things are going well, these systems cooperate and are managed by something we might call a self, which would

4:25be yet be yet another system. In internal family systems, Schwartz called these systems families, hence the name, which was the big insight of his work, that there are lots and lots and lots of subunits of cognition, and these units cluster around shared goals for the organism that is you, and getting them to work together instead of attempting to silence them or ignore them, was a better way to become

4:58an ordered, functional person. I think of them more as departments than families, but the important part here is to create strategies for coordination and cooperation of these entities within yourself that want to pursue things that feel good and avoid things that feel bad, both in the real physical world and also in the thinking emotional world. Schwartz imagined that there were three big systems.

5:30There were the managers, these are the subunits of cognition that proactively resist and set up sort of ramparts against things that might be bad. Then firefighters, which react to bad things that are happening, things that you would rather not be happening. And then exiles. These are parts of you that would like to express themselves, but feel when they are exposed, vulnerable to harm.

6:03So that's his way of looking at it. And if you've ever had an argument with yourself, then you have an idea of what Schwartz was basing all of this on. If you've ever hit the snooze button and later berated yourself for doing so, or reached for a bag of chips and told yourself, hey, don't do that, and then you did do that, and then you felt bad about it, and then you said you wouldn't do it again, and then you did. If you've ever wondered why you keep doing things you know you should not do and would prefer not to do, that's really the origin of parts work.

6:37Or if you've ever had a conversation with yourself where you imagine some part of you doing the talking and another part doing the listening, like, I am so lazy, I really wish I wasn't so damn lazy, or, okay, get it together, you can do this. Or, ugh, why did I say that? You're so stupid, why do you do that? You have some notion of these foundations of IFS. And you may have some skepticism about all of this.

7:09I know I did. I just thought it seemed so metaphorical when I first learned about these things. And sometimes it just seems so mystical or wooish that initially I wasn't sure what I thought about it. But it has so much support, and there's a lot of evidence, there's a lot of research showing that the outcomes of using this in therapy are very positive, that I wanted to know more. So it was neat to see that Britt had written a book about it. So before we get into what all of this means, I think it's important to note that this is, in many ways, a philosophical framework.

7:48It's a language for discussing the mind so that both therapists and clients can create and commit to behaviors, to managing emotions and attitudes and actions and plans of action.

8:07In psychology, there are many silos. You have theoretical psychology, clinical psychology, applied psychology, neuropsychology. And these silos conduct evidence-based research, whose findings get shared back and forth across those silos. Then there's counseling and clinical psychology, where all of these silos inform different therapeutic frameworks between therapists and clients.

8:40Different therapists use different therapies based on all of this, and parts work is one of those therapies. One that Britt Frank says, in her experience, is the most effective of them all. While acknowledging, yes, this is a collection of metaphors. For concepts that we've been contemplating philosophically, poetically, artistically, for millennia. As Walt Whitman mused in 1855, do I contradict myself?

9:16Very well, then I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes. More recently, all of this reminds me of the work of early AI researchers and modern AI researchers, LLMs, the whole thing. But early AI researchers, like cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky, they spoke of this sort of thing all the time.

9:48He wrote a great book titled Society of Mind, which described human intelligence as a collection of simple subunits, which he called agents. And these agents could work together to build up into more complex processes. And different processes could share simpler agents with other more complex processes. There's an even higher order biological parallel processing. In Minsky's model, there is no central controller.

10:22Intelligence is emergent, and so is consciousness. As Minsky put it, quote, Minds are what brains do. And there are a lot of these models. Jerry Fodor's modular mind, Stanislas Duane's global workspace theory, Eric Byrne's transactional analysis model, Halon Sidra Stone's voice dialogue framework, Timothy Wilson's adaptive unconscious theory, and there are many others.

10:52All of these models start by recognizing the brain as a collection of biological organic structures that have different specialized functions that all work together to generate your mind. But not just your mind. The limbic system, the basal ganglia, the prefrontal cortex, the amygdala, All of these are collections of units of neurons whose action potentials generate your sense of balance, your drives, hunger, and sexual attraction, and feeling hot or cold, or pain, joy, melancholy, awe, anxiety, and so on.

11:36Similarly, up here, in truly complex collections of action potentials, the mind is also a collection of what we might call mental structures. Your sense of self, your values, your beliefs, your attitudes, your wants, and your not-wants. And as we ascend higher and higher from the neuronal source code of molecules crossing membranes and the electric meatball inside your skull, we will, at some point, we will, at some point, need to start talking in metaphors.

12:11And in a way, that's already what we're doing. We're almost always speaking in metaphors and abstractions, symbols and similes.

12:21Beliefs, attitudes, values, these are categorical boundaries around the mental output of a complex system. But we can't extract a belief with a scalpel and place that belief under a slide. You can put the organic material generating belief under a slide, sure, but you won't quote-unquote see the belief. And as neuroscientist David Eagleman once said, even if you could become so self-aware that you could deep-dive into the unconscious mind,

12:57the thoughts and emotions down there might look like machine language. As he put it, it would be like monitoring a transistor in a computer to better understand why a YouTube video was funny. So, when I use a single word like anxiety or a single term like disappointed or overjoyed, what I am describing is the downstream output of an immense conglomeration of interacting neural structures,

13:31so complex that we are still decades, maybe centuries, away from truly understanding what is being expressed and how. So, I can casually refer to a dense interplay of neurochemical splendor with a short sound made with lungs, teeth, and lips, or represented with marks on paper or indentations in stone.

14:02Yet, when I tell you, I am livid, for example, I'm expecting you to take that collection of phonemes, that sound, or series of symbols represented as a word, and allow it to trigger a thunderstorm of associations in your neural network, based on your priors and your experiences and your understanding, so as to get the gist of what I'm attempting to communicate.

14:37So, when it comes to something like parts work, or anything in psychology, really, the metaphors, the terms, the labels, the abstractions, the language we use to discuss the mind, it has immense power, as long as we accept these as tools, and only as tools. When we discuss your psychological shadow or your inner critic, we are not literally discussing a shadow in your hypothalamus,

15:09or a standalone entity wearing a hat, living in your medulla oblongata. You might prefer imagining the mind as programs running on an operating system, and those programs, as well as the operating system, all running on hardware, which itself is a collection of hardware systems. The gist of what we are discussing is what's important here. It's what's important in therapy. A shared language of gists, so that the therapist can work with the client toward a shared goal.

15:48And, according to this episode's guest, psychologist Britt Frank, the shared language of parts work is very effective when it comes to improving lives, changing unwanted behaviors, becoming more productive, and so on. And that is what we are going to discuss. That is what we are going to explore after this commercial break. If you get my gist. This is the sound of your engine getting clean

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20:15And now, we return to our program.

20:22I'm David McRaney. This is the You Are Not So Smart podcast and we are now going to listen to my interview with psychologist, therapist, trauma expert, author, speaker, science, advocate, science communicator, Britt Frank, about her new book, Align Your Mind.

20:43Hi, I'm Britt Frank. I'm a licensed neuropsychotherapist, trauma specialist, recovering hot mess, and author. You've got more than 10,000 hours with clients. You've done this for a long time. You sit down with people who need help and help those people, right? Am I correct? That is correct. I actually clocked it. I hit about 12,000 plus client hours with me in the therapist's chair. I don't know how many of me being in the client's chair. But yeah, I have done over 10,000 hours of therapy. So this is not a I took a class

21:14for an hour and now I'm an Insta expert. This makes me feel better about asking you these questions about what it means to be a person. I love all of your work and then I was astonished like, oh my gosh, she already has another book. What is this book? And Align Your Mind is the title of this thing for people who are not familiar with parts work. That's what this focuses on with shadow work and all sorts of other cool stuff in there. You say in the book that nothing

21:45in the therapeutic model is as effective as parts work. What do you mean? How can that be, sir? What are you really, truly believe this, Britt Frank? It's a big statement to say that of all the therapeutic frameworks and models and peer-reviewed double-blind placebo studies that have been done, this anecdotally parts work and I'll explain what that means is the thing that I have seen move the needle personally and professionally not in isolation. We need all the things. We need protein and we need sleep

22:15and we need some people need psych meds. Great. I take them. But parts work as a way of life, a way of approaching how we think does unlock a whole bunch of stuff that things don't seem to get to. Thinking positive and chanting and affirmations are great, but there's a reason why the best wellness advice isn't effective for everyone all of the time. And so parts work is the thing that I have found if I was stuck on an island with one tool left in my toolbox, psychologically speaking, it would be this one. It would be parts work.

22:46Okay. And one of the things I love about parts work is that whichever expert is talking about it, whether that's you or some of the founders of this stuff because it's been around for a while, they acknowledge these are helpful terms for things that we are probably a long way away from understanding at the super microscopic granular level. But having a framework like this gives you the ability to work in a way that gets results. Okay.

23:16All right. I think you quote Neil deGrasse Tice in the book that like past hardcore physics, it gets blurrier and blurrier as we get out here. Still, there's a Jungian quote that until you make the unconscious conscious, it'll direct your life and you'll call it fate. The world of psychology and the world especially of therapy from many different modalities of therapy, these language frameworks for describing

23:48what's happening at a deeper and deeper level, we're going to get down to molecules interacting with one another. But these, up here at these higher levels, we're discussing how things are operating and how you can change your behavior and change your inner monologue and things. It works, is the thing. Like, this language that we're using is strange and blurry, but the outcome of this therapeutic model, parts therapy, is tangible. And if you want to find evidence of that, there's been plenty of research into that that shows that it is effective

24:18and worthwhile. So let me just get this one thing out of the way before we get deeper. What is the mind? And I say it like this because the mind as a term is this nebulous, intangible abstraction and it's useful as a reference point. If you're a neuroscience, it's one thing. If you're a proctologist, it's one thing. If you're a psychologist, it's one thing. If you're a philosopher, it's one thing. So I'm wondering for you, Britt Frank,

24:48in the context of this book, Align Your Mind and in your work in general, what is, quote unquote, the mind? It's so hard and it's hard for me too because my first book, The Science of Stuck, did focus on science, object, you know, things that you can study. If you cut open someone's head, you could see a brain. You can poke different areas and see what happens if we poke this. The mind is something that you can't put it in a test tube. You can't put it in a lab.

25:18And so I'm not going to sit here and say that I have solved the age-old question of what is consciousness? What I can say is in my experience as a human and helping other people, human, it seems to be that the mind is the thing inside us that talks, that has opinions. And I'm not talking about like audio hallucinations where you're hearing things externally. I'm talking about hearing what you're thinking. Some people don't have that. Some people genuinely have zero inner monologue.

25:49They don't hear their thoughts. And this framework is not super helpful. If you don't hear your thoughts, this is not the book for you. But all of the people that come to my practice and all of the people for whom my work is helpful have some sense of hearing themselves think things like, part of me knows don't do drugs. But this other part of me seems to be hell-bent on going in this direction. It's baked into our language. Part of me knows, part of me doesn't. Do you realize how profound of a statement that is to say that there are two parts of me who both want

26:20different things who are competing for the resources of time and energy? That's a big deal. And we say it like it's nothing. To think that you're arguing with yourself is a weird concept. In Western thought, it took, I love that it took a minute for this to sort of get into our purview. But if you've ever said, why did I do that? Or what was I thinking? I like, here's mine that I say a lot. Why are you like this?

26:50I'll say that, I'll say that out of my mouth, like into the air, like with my actual teeth and gums and lips. Why are you like this? And then like, so who am I talking to? Who is listening? Who's the, which part of me is saying why am I like this? And which part of me is hearing that and I'm expecting to answer back. If you've ever done anything like that, you already are a little bit down the line of understanding what we're doing here, right? Like that's, that's a big part of it,

27:20right? It's absolutely bananas. And there's a comedian, I love Pete Holmes and he does the most hilarious bits about the brain. And he does a thing where he said, all right, everyone in the room, sing happy birthday in your head.

27:33What the, what is that? Because you did it, I just did it. I'm hearing it. So who's the me that's singing and who's the me that's listening to the singing and how come that guy can tell me a thing and now I'm going through that song in my head. Brains are weird and minds are even weirder. So the framework of our mind is made of different parts like the movie Inside Out, Pixar is the closest thing I've ever seen to, that's how our minds work. If you can talk to yourself and we all do it,

28:04we think to ourselves, we talk to ourselves. Parts work simply suggests making it a conversation, a dialogue instead of a monologue.

28:28You have a most asked question in therapy, you say in the book, and you have had clients that are mega CEOs and troubled teenagers and everything in between and the most asked question you say in the book is how come part of me knows exactly what I need to do but it's this other part of me that seems to take over and I don't seem to be able to get it done. I would say that is the most, the why,

28:58why am I like this is sort of, it runs concurrent but why am I like this means why is it that part of me knows drink the water, hug the puppy, phone a friend and this other part of me is binge watching White Lotus and doom scrolling till four in the morning and so I stand by that. Why is it that I know the thing? A lot of what makes us healthy and happy is not rocket science. We know what to do. We're drowning in information yet we're more unhappy, we're more unhealthy, we're more depressed, quote. So Alan Watts says problems that remain unsolvable

29:30are questions that ask the wrong way and so if the question is why is part of me going this way and part of me going that way, wouldn't it be reasonable to infer that we need to understand what the parts are? How are you supposed to solve a parts problem without a working framework of what parts are, how they work, how to work with them and what this mess we call our mind is? We can all agree there's an electrified meatball thing going on here but that electrified meatball invented tiramisu and went to the moon so I'm okay with that

30:01but to go to the moon you have to like have some sort of discipline when it comes to tiramisu which is part of what parts work is all about. You have to say yes I want that but I need to do this and the best thing about parts work and this was a total I didn't know any of this until reading your book was I used to think that the part of me that wanted tiramisu instead of whatever else or the part of me that wanted to do X instead of whatever else

30:32or didn't want to eat right or exercise or communicate or do the hard things I thought you had to like kill that part of you that did strangle it you had to lock it up in a cage and that until that was handled in that way I was bad I was lesser than and sort of like I guess the question is what is parts work and what what are some of the big misconceptions

31:03that it immediately wipes off the board? Yeah well the whole kill your ego and banish your inner critic and take that part of you that likes to do the bad thing and lock it up in the closet and send it away that doesn't work because if it worked it would have and you cannot get rid of parts of your own mind you can't amputate consciousness like you can a physical body part and so and then here's the science where the science meets sort of the esoteric if you think

31:34the enemy of your well-being lives inside your head and I have to kill something or banish something or tell something you're a liar shut up well your brain is really literal your brain is really smart but it's also really simple in some ways okay if we are being attacked and we have to fight and kill and strangle well we better release cortisol because we got to get you ready to fight or to strangle or to attack which is going to have very real physiological consequences so this idea that our mind is made of parts

32:05and all of them when properly trained have a role to play isn't this saccharine sweet just be nice to yourself just accept yourself there are real physiological implications of approaching the different parts of us not with the war metaphor so that was a really long-winded sidebar what is parts work parts work is the idea that your mind just like your body just like any complex system that you've ever seen is made of many moving parts and each part has a different job

32:35your endocrine system does a different job than your elbow and each thing needs a different intervention you don't care for your kidneys the same way you do for your teeth and so we treat our minds like it's this one evil empire that's out to get us that's out to sabotage us and our job is to destroy it or to silence it and then we wonder why are we anxious and depressed and burnt down and whatnot parts work is the idea that your mind just like your physical body if you know how to work it out how to train it how to nourish it

33:06then things tend to work better okay all right and with you there are probably billions there are hundreds and thousands of operating units there's a I have a great book from Marvin Minsky from back in the day signed by Marvin Minsky I just want everybody to know called Society of Mind talking about this modular system of individual units it's very GPT LLM coded for these these little operators that work up into more complex operators that interact with one another in parts work

33:36we can make it much simpler by referring to them and different people who talk about this in different ways will have different terms for the most active and largest operating parts that will be discussed in a therapeutic system you have your own and I dig them very much you have protectors reactors story keepers and weirdos what are these parts and what do they do Brit Frank so parts work is this umbrella idea that you're multiple I'm multiple our minds are a multiplicity

34:06it's a multiverse I use the internal family systems framework which was developed by Dr. Richard Schwartz and he's been studying this and doing this he created this beautiful model it's been his life's work and I just took it and went rogue with it and I'm like this is the scrappy cousin of what's called IFS therapy I wanted to take it out of the therapy room and make it in my way just really really here take this even if you never set foot in a therapist's office you can work with your mind in this way and he very generously blurbed the book I was terrified to send it to him

34:37hey buddy here's your life's work totally bastardized so what I call the parts you can boil down to we have protective parts we have reactive parts and then we have parts that need protecting if you think of the sacred service you've got the bodyguards and then the thing that they are protecting and so inside your mind your protector parts are the ones who try to prevent bad feelings or bad things your reactors are the ones who show up when that doesn't work and so both of them

35:08have the same objective protect the brain from pain even though like as a drug addict you could argue rightly so that I was creating more pain by doing crystal meth is not a healthy coping skill for a trauma history but if the objective is avoid the trauma history then crystal meth is actually quite useful if we're just objectively going with if the object of the game is avoid the trauma speed will help you to do that it'll kill you in the process that's why this idea

35:38of good and bad there are good and bad behaviors but this binary morality that we were taught the good guys and the bad guys drugs bad sobriety good that model doesn't work for the complexity of our humanness and so drugs are bad yes but if you don't know the function of what those reactors are trying to accomplish then you're going to be fighting with yourself and if you're fighting with yourself you're kind of screwed so let me talk

36:16about these parts so protector parts so if I'm hearing you correctly they're functional entities being generated by the brain in the thing we call the mind that are concerned with affecting your behavior in ways that will prevent you from feeling pain or prevent you from being harmed in some way is this sort of on the right track there yeah and people who are protector part dominant are the ones who are really controlling and try to manage everything and are anxious

36:47and try to anticipate every scenario ahead of time and we all have all the parts you know we have a full set of characters in our heads and because of life and genetics and trauma and whatever some people are more protector parts dominant other people have reactors who are addicts or who doom scroll or it doesn't have to be high level bad things anything that you do that feels reactive if I every time I get frustrated pop off on someone that is one of my reactors

37:18trying to prevent whatever it thinks is going to be bad you can categorize them and I know when I'm in my preventer when I'm trying to anticipate every which and neither is bad nothing is you know in this in this framework we have to take the morality out of it because if you don't get curious about function and you get focused on good versus bad you're not going to be able to work with a complex system the protectors are sort of anticipating future harm and the reactors are dealing with current a current thing that's happening that can can be dealt with

37:49in some way as it seems like and one is preventing pains one is stopping pain the this already just with two parts they can have competing agendas and there's already going to be like a cacophony in here in the pursuit